On 'Jeopardy!' Watson Win Is All but Trivial

Facing certain defeat at the hands of a room-size I.B.M. computer on Wednesday evening, Ken Jennings, famous for winning 74 games in a row on the TV quiz show, acknowledged the obvious. "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords," he wrote on his video screen, borrowing a line from a "Simpsons" episode. From now on, if the answer is "the computer champion on "Jeopardy!," the question will be, "What is Watson?" For I.B.M., the showdown was not merely a well-publicized stunt and a $1 million prize, but proof that the company has taken a big step toward a world in which intelligent machines will understand and respond to humans, and perhaps inevitably, replace some of them. Watson, specifically, is a "question answering machine" of a type that artificial intelligence researchers have struggled with for decades -- a computer akin to the one on "Star Trek" that can understand questions posed in natural language and answer them. Watson showed itself to be imperfect, but researchers at ...